by Peter Straub
“Don,” I said, “your heart isn’t in this. You checked out the door maybe five or six times since we sat down. Is there someone you’re afraid will come in? Is someone following you? Obviously, you’re on the lookout.”
“Okay—when you’re in the slammer, you learn to keep an eye on the door. You get a little jumpy, a little paranoid. Couple of weeks, I’ll be back to normal.”
He made another quick check of the entrance.
“When did you get out, anyhow?”
“I took a bus up here this morning. Know how much money’s in my pocket? Twenty-two bucks.”
“Don, I don’t owe you anything. Let’s be clear about that.”
“Harwell, I don’t think you owe me anything, could we be clear about that? I just figured, maybe you’d be willing to help me out a little, you and your wife. She was always great, you were always a good guy, and you’re about a million times better off than anyone else I know.”
“Leave my wife out of this.”
“Oh man, that’s harsh,” Olson said. “I loved the Eel.”
“So did everybody else. What do you mean, help you out a little?”
“Let’s save the business for after lunch, all right? I’m thinkin’ about when we were all on top of the world, our little bunch. And you and the Eel were ‘the Twins.’ Because you sure did look a lot alike, you gotta give me that.”
“I wish you’d stop calling her ‘the Eel,’” I said.
It was as though he had not heard. “Man, she must have been one of the great tomboys of all time.” For the first time since we had taken the table, Olson seemed able to step aside from his obsession with the door and fully inhabit his half of the conversation.
I remembered something that dampened my sudden flare of anger. “In the old days, when I wanted to piss her off, I called her Scout.”
Olson’s face creased into a smile. “She was like the girl in, you know, that movie …”
I found that I remembered nothing about a movie I had held perfectly in mind a moment before. Lately, these mental vacancies and erasures seemed to be happening with an increasing frequency. “The one with that actor …”
“Yeah, and he was a lawyer …”
“And Scout was his daughter …”
“Damn,” said Olson. “At least you can’t remember, either.”
“I know it, but I don’t know it,” I said, frustrated but no longer in a bad temper. Our shared failing had put us on a common footing; and this evidence of Olson’s aging had served, however paradoxically, to evoke the forthright and appealing young man Dill had been. Full of sweetness, the past bloomed before me.
Simultaneously, we said, “To Kill a Mockingbird.” We burst out laughing.
“I have to ask,” I said. “What were you charged with?”
For a second, Olson glanced up at the ceiling, exposing a skinny, wrinkled neck that looked like some inedible organic vegetable in a health food store. “I was charged with and convicted of committing crimes of gross indecency with a young woman. The alleged victim was eighteen years old and engaged in an informal program of study with me. For a couple of years, I’d been working with the erotic occult. I started out with a group of ten or twelve, it shrank to maybe six, you know how that goes, and in the end it was just me and Melissa. It got so we could prolong the act like to infinity. Unfortunately, she mentioned this feat to her mother, who went completely nuts and got the university involved, which wound up with the Bloomington vice squad hauling me out of my sweet no-rent sublet and dragging me off to the station.”
At this point, Olson’s eyes again moved from my face to the doorway.
“Indiana turns out to be the most self-righteous state in the Union.”
Don Olson once again returned to me, his old friend, and the conversation, this time without the effect of bringing a lost era back to life.
“You were in an Indiana state prison?”
“I started out in Terre Haute, then I was sent to Lewisberg, PA. After six months, they sent me here, to Illinois. Pekin. They like to keep you off balance. But I can do my work in prison the same as anywhere else.”
The calamari arrived. We began spearing pieces of fried squid and popping them into our mouths. Don Olson leaned back in his chair and groaned with pleasure. “God, real food again. You have no idea.”
I agreed: I had no idea. “What did you mean, your work? What could you do in jail?”
“Talk to other prisoners. Show them another way to think about what they had done and where they were.” Olson resumed eating, but did not let it interfere with his explanations. Bits of fried squid and batter occasionally sprayed from his mouth. His glances at the entrance punctuated his sentences. “It was like social work, actually.”
“Social work.”
“Plus the old hoodoo mojo,” Olson said, rippling his fingers before him. “Without you got the sizzle, you can’t sell the steak.”
Ashleigh returned and picked up Olson’s plate without getting near enough to be reeled in. Returning with a small but heavily laden tray, she slid our plates before us with the finesse of a croupier.
Olson cut into the massive pork chop and brought a glistening nugget to his mouth. “Whoa,” he said, and chewed for a bit. “Man, these guys know how to cook a pig, uh huh.”
He stopped grinning long enough to swallow. “When we all fell in love with Spencer Mallon, the Eel was right there, alongside Hootie and Boats and me. Why you weren’t, I never understood. You stayed away, but you must have heard all about it.”
“Not really,” I said. “But that’s part of the reason I asked you to come here.”
Olson waved at the waitress for more drinks and took the opportunity to check out the doorway again. “Way I look at it, you kept yourself out back then. In fact, way I remember it, you were sort of pissy about what we were doing.”
“I didn’t see the point of pretending to be a college student. Especially for Hootie, for God’s sake! And your ‘guru’ smelled like bullshit to me.” For a second or two, I watched Olson eat. Then I cut the giant burger down the middle and took a bite from the dripping half-moon in front of me.
“Mallon put a curse on all of you, my wife included.”
Olson’s wandering eyes snapped back to my face, and there he was again, fully present. It was like turning on a big battery, like watching a statue come suddenly to life.
“Jesus, you’re still weird about this. It still puts a hair up your ass.” He shook his head, smiling. “And do you really think there’s any difference between a blessing and a curse? I’d be amazed if you did.”
“Come on,” I said, a little taken aback by his sudden intensity. “Don’t give me that Mallon horse shit.”
“Call it what you like,” Olson said, concentrating now on his new margarita. “But I’d say the same principle applies to me. And to the Eel.”
“Her name is still Lee Truax.”
“Whatever.”
I took a moment to work on the giant burger while keeping an eye on Don Olson. I tried to work out how far he was willing to go.
“I suppose Mallon’s blessing is the reason you went to jail.”
“Spencer’s blessing allowed me to do exactly what I wanted for the past forty years, not counting jail time.”
Something struck me. “Pekin’s a federal prison. How does a sex offender wind up there?”
“He probably doesn’t.” Olson smiled an off-center smile. Another glance over my shoulder. “Come to think of it, probably wasn’t Melissa Hopgood got me sent away. Let’s call it a financial miscalculation.”
“The IRS?” Tax fraud sounded too boring for the man who had once been the heroic Dill.
Olson made a big deal of savoring his mouthful of pork. I saw him come to a conclusion a moment before he swallowed. “The error was, the mechanism we used to create extra money was pretty fuckin’ dubious.”
He grinned and raised his hands: Hey, you got me.
“Melissa knew this kid. Tu
rned out the kid was a sort of big-time facilitator. From a big, serious family. Lot of money flowing into the country, lots of money flowing out. If I could help him with a distribution issue, I’d make enough to get off the road and settle down somewhere. I thought I’d maybe write a book.”
He winked at me. “The stuff about erotic magic was all straight truth, by the way, and Melissa did go and blab to big fat Maggie Hopgood about all the orgasms she was having, but she threw in some stuff about the distribution setup, and that’s why the boys dragged me away in the cold, cold mornin’.”
“A drug deal.”
“Let’s just say, my get-rich-quick scheme didn’t pan out. From now on, I stick to honest labor and the kindness of friends.”
“Is this where we get to business?”
Don Olson racked his knife and fork. His plate now held only a bone, a knot of gristle, and brown smears. “A minute ago, you said you were still curious about Spencer and the old days.”
I said nothing.
“You tried to get the Eel to tell you what happened that day in the meadow?”
I held my silence.
“I’m not surprised. It’s a hell of a topic. You guys must have spent a lot of time with the police.”
“They were interested in what I might have heard about Keith Hayward. If he had enemies, stuff like that. All I knew was that my girlfriend hated his guts. Which I wasn’t about to say.”
“Hootie hated him, too.”
“Later on, did Spencer ever say anything about Hayward?”
Now it was Olson’s turn to let a question hang in the air.
“I did a little research, and some pretty interesting stuff turned up. Do you remember hearing about the Ladykiller, back around 1960?”
“Hayward couldn’t have been the Ladykiller,” Olson said, firmly. “He had a whole different bag.”
“I’m not saying he was. But he had a connection to the murders, and I have the feeling that he had at least some kind of effect on whatever happened out there in the meadow.”
“Ask that gorgeous Miss Thang for the check,” Olson said. He looked up and regarded the ceiling for a couple of seconds. “To get me back on my feet, I need, hey, a thousand dollars.” He grinned. “Of course, the amount is up to you.”
“On the way to my place we can stop at an ATM. And yes, the amount is up to me.” I waved at the waitress and pretended to scribble in the air. She brought the check, and I handed her a credit card. Olson leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms over his chest. He never took his eyes from my face. It must have cost him something to keep from eyeing the entrance. After I added a tip and tore off the receipt, I stood up and stared at the floor for a little while. Olson continued regarding me.
I met his gaze. “I’ll give you five hundred.”
Olson stood up without taking his eyes off mine. Smiling an annoying lopsided smile, he moved toward the entrance with a sloping, sidling walk that insinuated a trace of criminality and an underlying degree of physical strength. It seemed a kind of unspoken rebuke. Several of the remaining patrons kept their eyes on Olson, making sure he was really leaving.
The bright dazzle of Chestnut Street seemed lighter, less ponderous than the atmosphere we had just left. “What did you do in there before I showed up?”
“Shook ’em up a little,” Olson said, grinning at the memory.
“So I gather.”
“When my first margarita came up, I had me a little taste and said, ‘In the joint you can get any kind of drug you can name, only it’s like tequila was wiped off the face of the earth, which is pretty fuckin’ strange when you consider how many Mexican motherfuckers are doing time.’ Then I started talking about you, but the damage was done.”
I steered my companion north onto Rush Street, and for a couple of minutes Olson fell silent to inspect both the people around them and the spaces between the people. Being outside, I saw, increased his sense of threat. Chicago’s usual gridiron charge and swerve occupied the sidewalks. Olson did not excite notice until we paused for a traffic light, when several people moved away from his odor.
“I didn’t expect so much hostility out here in the land of the free.”
“A shower and a change of clothes will fix that. I’m amazed you can’t smell yourself.”
“On the bus everybody smelled this way.”
Two more blocks took us to the Oak Bank, and I stopped in front of the ATM machine. Before I could pull out my wallet, Olson whispered, “Let’s go into the lobby, okay?”
He was nodding like a bobblehead doll. Transacting our business out on the street ramped up his anxiety.
“We’re in no danger here.”
“Must be nice to feel that way,” Olson said.
I took him into the lobby and led him toward the row of ATM machines. A bearded kid with a backpack was punching numbers into the machine at the far right, and a guy who looked like he might once have been a college lacrosse player—broad back, short hair, starched blue shirt, pressed chinos—was withdrawing money from an ATM near the center of the row. I moved toward the machine two openings to the lacrosse player’s left, but Olson stepped in front of me and, like a sheepdog, guided me to the last machine in the line.
“You have no idea how many ways people can figure out your ATM number just by watching you. Trust me.”
I extracted my card from my wallet. Olson posted himself like a bodyguard at my shoulder. I brought the card to the lip of the slot and paused. “Hmmm …”
Olson stepped back and twisted his neck to look at me.
I pushed my card in and immediately pulled it back out. Olson made a show of looking away while I tapped in the code numbers. “I wish I knew why I said I’d give you five hundred bucks.”
“I’ll tell you, if you really want to know.”
While the screen asked me what I wanted to do now that I had its attention, I swung around sideways and raised my eyebrows in silent demand.
“Because I asked for a thousand.”
While bills shuttled out of the ATM, he tilted his head, propped his left elbow in the palm of his right hand, and snapped his fingers.
Olson folded his twenties and fifties into the front pocket of his jeans. “People tend to act in certain specific ways. Spencer had it all figured out. You always ask for twice as much as you really want.”
A few minutes later, the two of us turned into Cedar Street. After a quick, darting inspection of the terrain, Olson remarked that I sure did live on a beautiful block. Past the restaurants bordering Rush Street, handsome row houses and residential buildings extended eastward beneath the shelter of great trees toward the bright blue immensity of Lake Michigan. For some reason, he stepped off the sidewalk and began to walk toward a semicircular asphalt drive curving up toward the glass entrance of a tall apartment building that, although contemporary in style, fit in perfectly with the comfortable affluence of its surroundings. I had spent a significant portion of my life in that building.
I asked Olson where he was going.
Puzzled, Olson looked back over his shoulder. “Isn’t that where you live?” He jerked a thumb at the apartment building.
“No. What makes you think so?”
“Some kind of instinct, I guess.” He looked sharply up at me. “To tell you the truth, I once spent some time in that building. A girlfriend of Mallon’s let us stay there when she was out of town. But I swear, that’s not the reason. I had this feeling …” Olson brought a hand to his forehead and peered up at me. “Usually, I’m right about stuff like this. Not this time, huh?”
I shook his head. “I lived in that building for twelve years. Moved out in 1990. That’s where I wrote The Agents of Darkness and the three books after it. I wonder how you …”
“I’m not a complete fake,” Olson said, appearing to be confused about some central point. “But if you moved out in 1990, why are we here?”
“I moved right across the street, to number twenty-three.” I pointed at my four-story
brownstone with a shining red door and two rows of clean modern windows on the upper floors. Despite the competition offered by its handsome neighbors, I had always considered it the best-looking building on Cedar Street.
“You must be doing pretty good,” Olson said. “What apartment did you live in over there?”
I struggled against the impulse to conceal information from him. “Nine A. It was a nice place.”
“Same apartment as the one Mallon and I borrowed from the girl. Nine A—right down at the end of the hallway.”
“Now you’re starting to freak me out. I first heard about the building from my wife.” I took out my keys as we moved toward my red door.
“Why are you being so generous with me?” Olson asked, maddeningly. “Forget that shit about getting half of what you ask for. You didn’t have to give me five hundred bucks, and for sure you don’t have to let me into this house. It’s not like I expect you to give me everything I want.”
“Is that right?”
“I just got out of prison, man, we were never really close close friends, and you’re gonna let me walk into this amazing house?” He tilted his head to look up at the brick facade and its rows of shining windows. “You and the Eel live here alone? With all this space?”
“We live alone.”
“Only now even she isn’t here.”
I could not help it, I flared out. “If you’re afraid to come in, go across Rush and check into the local flophouse.” I pointed down the street and across the busy avenue, where a yuppie bar seemed to be supporting a sagging residence hotel for derelicts, identified by a big Jetsons-in-Miami neon sign as the Cedar Hotel.
“I’m not afraid of your house,” Olson said. This, I understood, was almost but not quite the literal truth. “And believe me, I’ve stayed in that fleabag more times than you can imagine. But what the fuck do you really want from me?”
I inserted the long key into the enormous lock, then swung the red door open onto a wide vestibule with rosewood walls, a Shiraz rug, and a Chinese vase filled with fleshy-looking calla lilies. “For one thing,” I said, offering the first rational thing that came to mind, “I’d like to hear about Brett Milstrap.” This statement, which I had uttered without benefit of any sort of thought or consideration, startled me. If I had paused to think about it, I would have said that I had long ago forgotten the name of the second fraternity boy who had been in Spencer Mallon’s adoration circle.